


Twee

by Omega_93



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow, Twig - Wildbow
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-18 19:14:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29862783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omega_93/pseuds/Omega_93
Summary: One year after the Lambs found themselves on Earth Bet and agreed they'd search for a way home, they head to Brockton Bay. Their objective? The mad bomber, Bakuda.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 10





	Twee

We moved down the street as a group. Gordon walked at the head of our formation—good looking, tall, blond, muscular, it was almost a given that we’d present him as the leader of our ‘team.’ Mary and Helen flanked him on either side, a few paces back as if in deference. Their role was an obvious one: two beautiful young women who held themselves with supreme confidence on either side of him would give Gordon a sort of legitimacy and respect in the eyes of those we were meeting, and respect would be sorely needed at a venue where we’d be strolling in uninvited.  
  
Jessie, Lillian, and I walked behind them, with Jessie behind Helen and Lillian behind Mary. I thought about making a teasing comment to Lillian about her motivations for choosing to walk behind Mary when she was in a skintight leotard covered with tinsel to conceal her weapons, but thought better of it. With my position behind Gordon and his dark blue costume that left little to the imagination when his light cape swished in the wind, she simply had too much ammo for an obvious retort.  
  
Cars rumbled down the wide, busy street, more numerous than the carriages in even New Amsterdam had been, yet somehow infinitely more organised. They stuck to their sides of the road without fail, and little blinking orange lights informed other cars of their intentions—though, admittedly, not everyone used the ingenious mechanism.  
  
The cars distracted me. I couldn’t help it. Metal contraptions as heavy as a mid-tier warbeast, and their speed was generally measured in how many miles they could travel in an _hour._ It was as terrifying as it was exciting, and it was such a mundane thing in this world that people barely batted an eye at them.  
  
And cars were only scratching the surface of this world’s wonder.  
  
The United States had the Crown States beat in just about every aspect, if you asked me.  
  
That knowledge only brought only dark feelings out of me, so I tried not to think about it too much.  
  
“Head in the game, Sy,” Gordon called out, tapping a finger to his unfairly well-groomed blond head. He hadn’t even turned around.  
  
“How did you know?” I asked, injecting the auditory manifestation of a pout into my voice.  
  
“You’re always goofing off thinking about irrelevant things,” he said. “It’s inevitable. I don’t even need to look at you.”  
  
I turned to Jessie. “Are you going to allow some jumped up whippersnapper to bully your boyfriend like this?”  
  
“I feel like I’m going to regret engaging with you on this, but I feel the need to point out that whippersnapper is a few years younger than us, and yet he’s still taller than you,” Jessie said, her eyes teasing behind the clear lenses of her custom domino mask. She wore a heavy robe that covered her entire body, like a monk, and the book she held in one hand completed the picture.  
  
I staggered back, hand on my heart. “The betrayal!” I cried. I looked over my shoulder. “Lillian, you have my back, right?”  
  
“Focus, Sy,” Lillian said. Her costume was barely a costume at all, just the black coat she’d arrived here in and relatively normal modern clothes beneath. The only thing changed about her was the twisted flesh mask that attached itself to her face, obscuring her features. “Important thing coming up, here.”  
  
“But they’re being mean to me!”  
  
“You poor baby.”  
  
“I have a feeling you’re not particularly sympathetic to my cause, dear Lillian.”  
  
“Oh? What gave you that idea?” Lillian gave me a dry look, but her eyes were sparkling. Good.  
  
“And you!” I said, whirling around to face Gordon’s back once more. “What’s the big idea, huh? Did you die just so you could mock me with your existence? Was this all just a long con?!”  
  
Gordon snorted. “I hardly had a say in how I died, Sy.”  
  
His tone was teasing, but his words cut to the core. “Why’d you have to go and do that, huh?” I said, more subdued.  
  
Jessie put an arm round my shoulders.  
  
“I didn’t mean to,” Gordon said without looking back.  
  
Mary aimed a punch at his shoulder, hard enough he almost staggered into Helen, who was in her own little world at the moment, still delighted with her new red cocktail dress.  
  
“You’d better not do that again,” Mary said. “No dying. Not now we’re all back together.”  
  
“Of course not,” Gordon replied.  
  
 _Dang it._  
  
“Weeeell, that got heavy real fast,” I said.  
  
“You brought it up,” Gordon said.  
  
“I didn’t want a touching moment! I wanted things to be a bit less serious.”  
  
“This _is_ serious,” Lillian said. “We’re in a new city, dealing with unknown opponents—”  
  
“Jessie already has their profiles memorised, actually. I think.”  
  
“—and we need to put up a good showing. We could get by on the rep we built up in New York, but we’re back to square one, here. The people in here will be looking to poke and prod.” Lillian gestured down the street as she spoke, to the shabby old building that was apparently our destination.  
  
If I had to describe it in one word, I’d call it a dump. If I had as many words as I wanted, I’d call it a rundown building in the bad part of town with dull, cracked brickwork, windows marred with rusted bars, and a gloomy atmosphere that made it perfect for a meeting between villains.  
  
Mary, for her part, shot me a dangerous look over her shoulder as we got closer. I could imagine her putting two fingers to her eyes, then pointing them at me, and I held up my hands in mock surrender. Her glare didn’t lessen until she’d turned back around.  
  
Would she be a problem? She’d been hyper-serious about this meeting since Helen had first told us about it, and it wasn’t difficult to imagine why. Ever since we’d been dropped in this world, full of people who could do impossible things, there was one thing that had consistently mattered above all else: reputation.  
  
 _Reputation_ scared potential enemies off from messing with you. _Reputation_ got people willing to pay for your services, or even for the promise of your inaction. _Reputation_ allowed you to walk into a meeting between known supervillains uninvited without getting attacked, which was probably the most useful point when considering that was exactly what we were about to do.  
  
Mary had been hyper-protective of the Lambs ever since we’d arrived in this world, and that led to her being… twitchy. Her capacity for violence was on a constant hair-trigger.  
  
While I found this world’s technology and advancement fascinating, it had become abundantly clear that Mary hadn’t adapted so well.  
  
“This is Somer’s rock?” Gordon said over his shoulder, eyes on Jessie.  
  
Jessie just nodded.  
  
“Alright,” Gordon said, slowing to a stop. He waited until we were arrayed around him before he spoke. “Everyone remembers the game plan?”  
  
“Why did you say everyone but you’re only looking at me?” I asked.  
  
Gordon said nothing.  
  
“Come on, my memory isn’t _that_ bad.”  
  
“What’s the game plan, Sy?” Helen asked, sing-song sweet, hands behind her back.  
  
“Uh.”  
  
Helen giggled. “You’re so silly.”  
  
I squinted at her. She was enjoying her airheaded beauty role a bit too much, in my opinion. Then again, I could never be sure with Helen. Even after all these years, my reads on her came down to instinct more than logic.  
  
Jessie sighed. “Gordon takes the lead, tries to muscle his way into a seat at the big boy table. The rest of us have his back and observe the crowd, feeding him information as best we can. We try our best to put ourselves in a position where we can capture this bomb tinker alive.”  
  
“Right. I knew all that,” I said. “Why do you guys always doubt me?”  
  
They all spoke at the same time, shouting over each other, listing every grievance they’d ever had against me and every time I’d ever messed up.  
  
“Okay, okay, I get it. Sheesh.”  
  
Everyone quieted down, but the silence barely lasted a beat before we broke into laughter.  
  
 _Much better_. The smile on my face had rarely felt so sweet.  
  
Of course, Jessie had to ruin it by _leaning down_ to fix my tie.  
  
“At least try to look presentable for something like this,” she said with a click of her tongue.  
  
“Well, it’s not my fault you guys decided I should wear a _suit_ as my costume,” I said.  
  
“You were the one who wouldn’t shut up about reputation and image,” Gordon said. “You’re still not worth shit in a fight, so better to have you looking like a sophisticated gentleman.”  
  
“The image thing doesn’t hold water when we look like a bunch of random people who got thrown together!”  
  
“You’re just saying that because you don’t like wearing a suit,” Jessie said.  
  
“Nuh uh! Our team should have a _theme_! We’re the Lambs, yet none of us have anything even vaguely related to that name!”  
  
Helen in a red cocktail dress, like she was on her way to a high-class party. Gordon, the picture of the superhero. Mary in her leotard that hugged her body in _all_ the right ways to distract from the fact she was stabbing you in the neck. Lillian in her imposing, professional black coat. Jessie looked like she’d got lost on the way to the frigging monastery.  
  
Me, in a stupid, ugly, uncomfortable, boring, stuffy, stupid suit.  
  
“I think you look cute,” Helen said, thoroughly derailing my rant with a smile that was enough to have even my black heart skip a beat. That just wasn’t fair.  
  
“Don’t even bother with him, he’s a lost cause,” Lillian said to Jessie, who was still trying to wrangle my suit into something presentable.  
  
Jessie smiled. “My lost cause.”  
  
I made a retching sound.  
  
~~~  
  
Silence greeted us as Gordon entered the bar first, then paused to let Mary and Helen flank him once more. Lillian, Jessie, and I came after, filling out the group. All eyes were on our group, though the majority of those were drawn to the photogenic members of our group, as planned.  
  
Somer’s Rock was somehow even more of a dump on the inside than the outside. The air was thick with the smell of alcohol, and the floor was more stain than carpet. I’d swear one in three of my steps _squelched._ The paint on the walls was peeling and cracked, and even when brand new the pale colour would’ve been tasteless.  
  
The walls were lined with booths, many of them filled out with the teams that had arrived before us, but for now my attention was fixed on the table that dominated the centre of the room.  
  
The leaders of the local gangs.  
  
 _Time to play my role._  
  
A man wrapped up in twisting metal armour, flanked on one side by a glowing woman in white and on the other by a shirtless man with a metal mask styled to look like a wolf. It wasn’t easy to get a read on him with the armour covering his whole body, but he gave me the impression of a man who was playing theatre. The way he was positioned at the head of the table was a statement, a power play. Like an emperor holding court. He wanted to give off the impression of supreme confidence, but something about all this had shaken him, even if it was slight.  
  
That could be exploited.  
  
I’d have to ask Jessie who he was, later. No doubt we’d already gone through a nice, long briefing on this, but I was about as likely to retain any of that as I was to remember what I had for breakfast on the second Saturday of last September. I dubbed him Emperor for now.  
  
To his left was a woman in a stylised welder’s mask and body armour. This one I could read much easier; she was tense, but not in fear or even anger. It was more professional displeasure, disconnected from the emotions that should’ve been flaring when her hometown was victim to a mad bombing spree. Worth noting.  
  
To _her_ left was a guy in a motorcycle helmet painted with a white skull over the visor, then decked out from head to toe in motorcycle leathers. He was nervous, clearly unused to being at the big boy table like this, but trying to project confidence and assurance. He’d be the easiest to rattle out of the four big guys, if it came down to that.  
  
Across from the two of them was a man in a skintight black costume with a white snake motif winding its way over his torso, around his back, and coming to rest atop his head. He sat with his chin resting on steepled fingers as he stared us down, and for some reason his posture didn’t give me the air of confidence it should have. I looked closer, and his back was straight, his shoulders were relaxed, and his gaze was steady.  
  
Still, there was something off. Wyvern coursed through my veins—I’d never had to have a single appointment since we arrived in this world, the formula had maintained the same just-below-peak level since the day we’d arrived—and some part of me must have been picking up on subconscious cues, connecting dots my eyes weren’t quite perceiving.  
  
Mary had positioned herself so she was facing the table side on at Gordon’s flank, and I flashed through hand signs to her as Jessie, Lillian, and I moved to stand behind Gordon, abandoning the original plan. The Emperor had set the precedent by having his lieutenants at the table, and we were going to abuse that to the fullest. It was important that we outdid him here. We had to dictate the pace of this conversation, and to do that we needed to wield our rep like a sword.  
  
Gordon took a seat, and we stayed standing behind him.  
  
“The Lambs,” the man in the snake costume spoke, as much to clue the rest of the room as to inform us he knew who we were. “You’ve built up quite the rap sheet for yourselves in the last year. Murder, thievery, kidnapping, arson, extortion. Mercenaries working all over the country, but primarily based in New York. Willing to take any job that doesn’t harm children. What brings you to our humble little town?”  
  
 _Well-informed_. _Connected._  
  
It didn’t fit with the cues I was getting from this guy. With that kind of information, he should’ve been more assured, confident.  
  
“We want to offer our services,” Gordon said, projecting his voice for power and authority.  
  
“Excellent,” Snakeman said. “If you stay to talk afterward, I’m sure we can come to an agreement.”  
  
Gordon shook his head. “I’m afraid our terms will have to be discussed with the room at large,” he said. A thrum of tension went through the gathered villains, and Gordon paused to let it simmer. Just when it looked like the Emperor was going to break the silence, Gordon spoke over him.  
  
“We want the tinker,” Gordon said.  
  
I took in the reactions to that. The indignation, the surprise, the suspicion. This would be a hit on our rep in their eyes after we’d just been built up by Snakeman, but it was to a small enough degree we were willing to give it up.  
  
As much as the United States was a paradise, as wonderful and wondrous as it was, it wasn’t home.  
  
We had unfinished business back in the Crown States, and we figured tinkers were our best bet to get us there. The bomber lady would probably be just as much of a dud as the last few, but we had to try.


End file.
